The Paris Wife

by Paula McLain

  “That was a perfect veronica, old boy,” Ernest said to Gerald later at the Iruna, but Gerald knew he wasn’t a tough or strong enough man to suit Ernest. He didn’t believe him and wouldn’t take the praise.

  “I promise to do it better next year, Papa,” he said. “It matters to me that I truly do it well.”

  I smiled at Gerald across the table, because I hadn’t done anything really well or truly for months. I was sad to my bones and Ernest was, too, and across the table Pauline looked as if she might burst into tears at any moment. We none of us were on our game. We none of us were living by our own standards.

  At the end of that chaotic week, Pauline boarded the train for Bayonne with the Murphys. She was headed back to Paris, to work. We were off to San Sebastian because that was what we’d always planned to do. But at a certain point, I knew the plans wouldn’t hold anymore. The bottom would drop out of every day.

  In San Sebastian there was a measure of peace with Pauline gone, but all that really meant was we could quarrel more freely, without interruption. We said nothing new to one another, but the old material still worked if we were loud and ugly enough with it.

  “She’s a whore,” I told him. “And you’re selfish and a coward.”

  “You don’t love me. You don’t love anything,” he said.

  “I hate you both.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I wish you’d die.”

  We embarrassed ourselves in cafés and taxicabs. We couldn’t sleep unless we drank too much, but if we crossed some line with the drinking, we couldn’t sleep at all, and then would just lie there beside one another, our eyes dry and red from crying, our throats clenched.

  Pauline continued to write every day and her voice was like a wasp in my ear: I’m missing my cherishables beyond reason. Please write to me, Hadley. I know we can all take care of each other and be happy. I just know it.

  “We can’t go on like this, can we?” Ernest said, picking up one of Pauline’s letters and then putting it down again. “Do you think we can?”

  “I hope not.”

  “The world’s gone to hell in every direction.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You make your life with someone and you love that person and you think it’s enough. But it’s never enough, is it?”

  “I couldn’t say. I don’t know anything about love anymore. I just want to stop feeling for a while. Can we do that?”

  “That’s what the whiskey’s for.”

  “It’s letting me down, then,” I said. “I’m raw all over.”

  “Let’s go home.”

  “Yes, it’s time we do. But not together. That’s done.”

  “I know it is,” he said.

  We looked at each other across the room and saw everything plainly and couldn’t say anything more for a long time.

  On our way back to Paris, we stopped overnight at Villa America, but we’d given up trying to fool anyone, even ourselves. Over cocktails at the beach, we told Gerald and Sara that we were splitting up.

  “It can’t be,” Gerald said.

  “It can. It is,” Ernest said, draining his glass. “But keep that coming, will you?”

  Sara gave me a tender look—as tender as she was capable of—and then got up to mix another shaker of martinis.

  “How will it work? Where will you live?” Gerald said.

  “We haven’t quite worked that out yet,” I said. “It’s all very new.”

  Gerald looked thoughtfully out to sea for several minutes and then said to Ernest, “I’ve got the studio, you know, at rue Froidevaux. It’s yours if you want it. As long as you need.”

  “That’s damned good of you.”

  “You have to count on your friends, right?”

  When Sara came back, Don Stewart and his pretty new bride, Beatrice Ames, trailed her. They were honeymooning at a hotel in town.

  “Donald,” I said, and embraced him warmly, but his face was pale and he looked uneasy, and so did Beatrice. Sara had obviously whispered our news on the way down to the beach. She’d made very good time.

  More chairs were brought round the little mosaic table in the sand, and we all drank pointedly and watched the dusk come.

  “I don’t mind saying I thought you two were indestructible,” Donald said.

  “I know it,” Gerald said. He turned to Sara. “Haven’t I always said the Hemingways did marriage like no one else? That they seemed lassoed to some higher thing?”

  “All right then,” Ernest broke in. “Let’s cut the postmortem, shall we? We’re sick enough as it is.”

  “Let’s have something happy,” I said. “Tell us about the wedding, Don.”

  Don flushed and looked to Beatrice. She was a very pretty Gibsongirl type, with a high forehead and red bow-shaped mouth, but just then she’d lost her composure. “I don’t think we should talk about it,” she said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Oh, that,” Ernest said. “You’ll get used to it.” His lips were tight and dry and his eyes were resigned. I could tell that all of this was going too fast for him but that he was playing through it anyway, following the gin and the blithe talk. The end had been coming for months and months, ever since our time at Schruns, but now that it was on us, we didn’t know what to do with it.

  It wasn’t until the next afternoon, when we were on the train back to Paris, that the full weight of what was happening hit us both. The day was airless and oppressively hot, and the train was too full. We shared a sleeping compartment with an American woman who carried an intricately scrolled birdcage with a small yellow canary inside. Before we’d said more than hello to her, the woman launched into an elaborate story of how the bird was a present for her daughter who had been engaged to marry a Swiss engineer before she stepped in to break up the match. “I immediately saw how I needed to send him packing,” the woman said. “You know how the Swiss are.”

  “Yes, of course,” Ernest said, tightening his lips around the words. He knew no such thing. “You’ll excuse me,” he said. “I think I’ll go and look for the porter.” When he came back, he was carrying a bottle of brandy and we drank it straight out of the water glasses on hand.

  We were near Marseilles by then, and out the window everything seemed very dusty and white-gray—the olive trees, the farmhouses and fieldstone walls and hills in the distance. All of it looked strangely bleached out and the woman was somehow still talking about marriage and how she hoped her daughter would forgive her. I drank my brandy and had another and tried not to hear the woman at all. The bird chirped prettily, but I found I didn’t want to hear that either.

  As evening fell, the woman finally closed her eyes and began to snore, her thick head nodding on her shoulders. We were coming into Avignon, where a farmhouse was on fire in a dry field. We could see the flames rising dramatically into the darkening sky and sheep running back and forth behind sagging fencing looking wild and panicked. The blaze must have announced itself early on, because much of the furniture was spread out in the field well away from the house while men worked to save what they could. I saw a pink enamel washtub and a rocking chair and a baby buggy on its side, and it was all utterly heartbreaking. This was someone’s life, a pile of furniture like matchsticks. It didn’t look rescued but abandoned—while smoke billowed in great plumes.

  When we approached Paris, it was very near morning. Ernest and I had both slept very little all night, and we had talked very little as well. What we did was drink and look out the window, where it seemed the signs of destruction were unending. On the outskirts of the city, near Choisy-le-Roi, a wrecked baggage car steamed in a crush to one side of the tracks.

  “Are we really going through with this?” I said to Ernest.

  “I don’t know, are we?”

  Just then, the American woman woke and stretched loudly and then took the velvet drape off the birdcage to wake the canary. Somehow it was morning and we were home, though it was hard to fee
l anything. I’d drunk so much brandy, my hands twitched with it and my heart thudded dully in my chest.

  When we arrived at the train station, Ernest handed the porter our bags through the window and we walked out onto the platform. It was nearly September, and the morning air was cool and dewy.

  “Sixty-nine rue Froidevaux,” Ernest told the taxi driver, and my breath caught in my throat. He was going to Gerald’s studio, not home with me. Not back to anything. It really was over.

  “Why not just go to Pauline’s apartment directly?” I said.

  “Please don’t start. This is painful enough.”

  “What would you know about pain? You’re doing this, you bastard.”

  I didn’t know what I was saying. The brandy was still clogging my bloodstream and moving my thoughts. For the moment, all I really knew was that I couldn’t be alone. I started to hyperventilate, and when Ernest moved closer, worried for me, I lashed out at him with the flat of my palm, hitting his chest, his shoulder, his jaw. Everything landed strangely, the way it does in dreams. My hand felt elastic and so did his body. I started to cry then and couldn’t stop.

  “Pardon my wife,” Ernest said to the driver in French. “She’s not well.”

  When the cab finally stopped, Ernest got out and came over to my side and opened the door for me. “C’mon then,” he said. “You need to sleep.”

  I let him lead me up the stairs like a mannequin. Inside the studio, there was a cold concrete floor, a single table and two chairs, and a low sink with a pitcher and stand. He walked me over to a narrow platform bed and tucked me into it, pulling a red wool blanket up to my chin. Then he climbed behind me and brought his arms around and tucked his knees against the backs of mine, hugging me as tightly as possible.

  “There’s a good cat,” he said to the back of my neck. “Please sleep now.”

  I started to shake. “Let’s not do this. I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. It’s already done, my love.” And he rocked us back and forth as we both cried, and when I slept finally, I didn’t give in to it as much as I was taken over by it, like a sickness or like death.

  When I woke up hours later, he was already gone. My head swam from the brandy and there was another level of nausea that came from a deep and unanswerable place. My life was in shambles; how would I right myself? How would I get through this? Picking up a piece of charcoal from a low table, I wrote him a note on sketchbook paper that was much calmer and more collected than I felt or even believed I could feel: So sorry for the scene in the cab. I’ve lost my mind, but I’ll do my best to be as good as I can about everything. I’ll want to see you, I will, but I won’t search you out.

  I left the studio, locking the door behind me, and walked out into a little courtyard, where a stone bench sat flanked by coppery mums. The walls to each side were hung with ivy. This was what Ernest would see when he gazed out the studio’s window—a new view that had nothing whatever to do with me. I tried not to let this terrible thought chink away at my thin resolve as I climbed into a cab bound for the Hôtel Beauvoir on the avenue de l’Observatoire. This was the first place I thought of because it was right across the street from the Closerie des Lilas and I’d looked up at it a thousand times and admired its simple and well-made wrought-iron grille and its pots of geraniums. I would find a way to live through this. I would rent two rooms, one for me and one for Bumby. Marie Cocotte would return from Brittany with him the following week, and I’d write to tell her to bring him there. We could breakfast every morning at the Lilas. He could see his father often there, and other friends, too, and it would all be very familiar, and that would be important now.

  As the cab moved slowly against traffic, I closed my eyes and tried not to think of anything except the café crème I would have very soon. I would make that last and then do what came next, whatever that was. All of my things were at the sawmill and they would have to be dealt with. I would ask Ernest to do it or hire someone, because I knew I couldn’t go back there. I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I never did again.

  FORTY-FOUR

  rnest once told me that the word paradise was a Persian word that meant “walled garden.” I knew then that he understood how necessary the promises we made to each other were to our happiness. You couldn’t have real freedom unless you knew where the walls were and tended them. We could lean on the walls because they existed; they existed because we leaned on them. With Pauline’s coming, everything had begun to tumble. Nothing at all seemed permanent to me now except what was already behind me, what we’d already done and lived together.

  I said all of this to Don Stewart one night at the Deux Magots. He and Beatrice were back in Paris and he had looked me up, worried for me and sick about our breakup.

  “I hate to be morbid,” I said, “but next week is our fifth anniversary. Or would be. His timing truly stinks.”

  “You could fight for him, you know.”

  “It’s much too late for that. Pauline’s pushing him to ask for a divorce.”

  “Even so, what will you do later if you do nothing now?”

  I shrugged and looked out the window where a very pretty woman in Chanel was waiting for someone or something on the corner. She was a slender black rectangle with a button of a hat, and she didn’t look fragile at all. “I don’t know that I can actually compete.”

  “Why should you have to compete? You’re the wife. He rightfully belongs to you.”

  “People belong to each other only as long as they both believe. He’s stopped believing.”

  “Maybe he’s just terribly confused.”

  He walked me back to my hotel and kissed me gently on the cheek, and it reminded me of that dangerous summer in Pamplona with Duff and Pat and Harold, when everything boiled over and grew ugly. But even then, there were small stabs of happiness.

  “You’ve always been good to me, Don,” I said. “That sticks more than you know.”

  “Forget what I said in the café if you want. I don’t mean to tell you what to do with your marriage. Hell, I’m only just married myself. But there must be something. Some answer.”

  I said good night and walked slowly up the stairs to the third floor, where Bumby was well asleep and Marie was folding Bumby’s clothes in perfect stacks with her very sure hands. I sent her home and finished the folding myself, thinking about what I still might do to make any kind of difference with Ernest. And the thing I kept coming back to was how if Pauline weren’t nearby and he couldn’t see her, he might come out of his fog and return to me. He still loved me; I knew it. But the real presence of the girl was like a siren’s call and he couldn’t fight it.

  The next day, feeling very resolved about a new decision, I walked to Gerald’s studio at the rue Froidevaux, through the little courtyard, which was still a battlefield of plaster body parts, and found Ernest working at the stiff little table. I didn’t sit down. I couldn’t.

  “I want you and Pauline to agree not to see each other for a hundred days.”

  He was silent and surprised. I’d definitely gotten his attention.

  “I don’t care where she goes—she can board a ferry for hell, for all I care—but she has to go away. You can’t see her and you can’t write her and if you stick to this and are still in love with her after the hundred days, I’ll give you a divorce.”

  “I see. And how did you come up with this brilliant scheme?”

  “I don’t know. Something Don Stewart said.”

  “Don? He’s always been after you, you know.”

  “You’re hardly in a position to judge.”

  “Yes, all right. So one hundred days? And then you’ll give me the divorce?”

  “If that’s what you still want.”

  “What do you want, Tatie?”

  “To feel better.” My eyes were wet and I struggled to keep more tears from coming. I handed him the piece of paper where I’d written out the agreement and signed it. “You sign it, too. I want this to be clear and straight.”

&nbs
p; He took it solemnly. “You’re not trying to punish me, are you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  He took the agreement to Pauline and told her the scheme and, strangely, she agreed right away. I guessed it was her very strong Catholicism that brought out the martyr in her. She might have thought my asking for three months was a reasonable request for a jilted wife, but she also might have felt she hadn’t yet suffered enough for the relationship. The separation would help with that. She wrote to me that she admired and trusted my decision, and then she took a leave of absence from the magazine, and booked a passage on the Pennland for the States.

  Within eleven days of my writing out the agreement, Pauline was out of Paris, if not out of the picture.

  “Can I write her while she’s still on board her ship?” he asked. “Is that allowed?”

  “All right, but then the hundred days don’t really start until she arrives in New York.”

  “You’re like some sort of queen, aren’t you? Handing down the rules.”

  “You didn’t have to agree.”

  “No, I guess that’s true.”

  “I’m not trying to be nasty,” I told him gently. “I’m trying to save my life.”

  Ernest hated to be alone and always had—but Pauline’s absence had left him more than alone and very vulnerable. Within a very few days, he showed up at my door at the dinner hour. He’d just finished writing for the day and had that look behind his eyes he always got when he’d been in his head for too long and needed talk.

  “How’d the work go today, Tatie?” I asked, inviting him in.

  “A little like busting through granite,” he said. “Can a fellow get a drink here?”